Setting up a website and publishing it are two different ball games. Every business needs a website to tap the extent of the Internet’s reach and to have a web presence to keep abreast, if not get ahead of, the competition. Although setting up a site is easy, getting ‘relevant’ visitors to the site involves expertise, the kind of which only Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts possess.

SEO professionals research your site and then determine the niche they need to target if you are selling leather goods, for example, they will research the most popular keywords and key phrases people are using on the major search engines to find sites dealing with those products. They will then make a list of the most popular of these ‘keyterms’, each attracting over 200,000 searches a month.

SEO involves many processes i.e. Optimising the site itself, creating backlinks, populating forums, article writing etc. The SEO professional will use the researched keyterms in the blue bar at the head of the browser when the site opens and also in various places in the content.

The same terms are then distributed to ‘Article writers’, the people who will write articles around the keyterms provided to them. These articles are posted on various sites with a link back to the site being optimised. These are called ‘Blacklinks’ and are very important as they tell the search engines how popular the site is.

The SEO pro will also submit the URL of your site to hundreds of search engine directories. He will also post advertisements on social networking sites, known as SMM (Social Media Marketing). This process also invloves populating forums by commenting on your site and leaving a link to your site on the forum.

Slowly, with each passing day, instances of your site on various websites increases and the popularity of your site. The engines will then ‘Index’ your site.

So, now you know where people arrive at a site, and why some sites have thousands of visitors each day!

Happy reading..